Russia House To Be Set Up In Ghana: Current President An Alumni

Natalia Krasovskaya, the executive director of the Russian Centre for Public Diplomacy, has announced that Moscow is preparing to open a Russia House cultural and education centre in Accra, Ghana’s capital city. Ghana is the first English-speaking African country to join the Russian House partnership list.

On Monday, 10 March, Krasovskaya said that an agreement had been signed allowing the ‘Centre for Public Diplomacy’ to establish a Russian House in Ghana with the support of Rossotrudnichestvo. She noted, ‘We met with representatives of several regions of the country, and they all indicated that their universities are waiting for us and looking forward to us, so I think that educational work, the very soft power of Russia, will spread quickly in Ghana, and I think that our universities will be happy about this partnership.’

Rossotrudnichestvo said in a statement that the network of partner Russian Houses now covers 17 countries. The key areas of work of the Russian Partnership in Ghana will be holding events dedicated to national Russian holidays, Russian language courses, preparing Ghanaian students to enter Russian universities, as well as holding lectures, exhibitions and film screenings about Russia.

Russian House is an informal name for Rossotrudnichestvo’s foreign representations, which are engaged in ‘strengthening Russia’s humanitarian influence in the world’. The programme to create a network of partner Russian Houses is conducted by Rossotrudnichestvo in order to expand the Russian cultural and humanitarian presence abroad. Earlier, the head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Yevgeny Primakov, said that the agency welcomes and supports initiatives to open partner Russian Houses abroad. New partner Russian Houses are appearing not only in countries where there was no Rossotrudnichestvo presence, but also where there are Russian Houses, where representatives of the federal agency work as part of Russian embassies. ‘These are private and public initiatives that we certainly support, we can rely on these people. The more we have such partners and friends, the better,’ Primakov said. Rossotrudnichestvo is currently represented by 86 foreign missions around the world.

During the 2023 Russia-Africa summit, President Putin proposed establishing Russian language centres across the African continent, citing education as a “traditional area” of cooperation between Moscow and Africa. In November, Rossotrudnichestvo said students from the continent are leading in applications to Russian universities, with over 14,000 submissions for the 2024–2025 academic year alone.

An example is Ghana’s current president, John Dramani Mahama, who obtained his postgraduate degree in social psychology from the Institute of Social Sciences in Moscow in 1988.

In February 2024, Russia’s People’s Friendship University in Moscow announced a five-year scholarship initiative to allow hundreds of students from Ghana to study for degrees in agriculture, information technology, waste management, and climate change.